What's your one August project?
Hi Everyone,
Harvard Business School tracked 27 large-company CEOs for 60,000 hours, with each executive assistant coding the leader's time in 15-minute blocks.
The CEOs spent 72% of their time in meetings, and only 43% of their time went to work they had chosen themselves. Much of the rest went to reacting to events as they came up.
August is the one month when those numbers move in your favor. Client calls get postponed, board meetings sit in September, and many of the people who normally fill your calendar are on a beach.
Today we're walking you through how to choose the one project that deserves these weeks.
Four weeks fit one project perfectly
The window is smaller than it looks, though. Part of it should be your own vacation, and the company still needs running through the rest.
What's genuinely available is enough time for one meaningful project, taken from start to finish, with every freed-up hour pointed at the same place.
Start with your pipeline
Check your Q3 and Q4 pipeline against target before anything else.
If it's clearly below target, spend August requalifying every open deal, cleaning out the ones that will never close, and booking meetings for the first week of September. No other project matters if Q4 revenue isn't coming.
If the pipeline is healthy, pick the project that can't survive a normal month.
Three fit that description well:
A pricing review: The work needs finance, product, and sales input as well as your own call, so book those people before you start. Aim to finish by early September, when your leadership team can review the proposal — and if the answer is an increase, we covered the rollout in the Pricing issue in April.
An org or role-clarity change: such as splitting an overloaded role or moving a team under a new leader. Do the thinking and the private conversations in August, then announce in September when everyone is back. Nobody should find out their reporting line changed while they were on vacation.
The process everyone complains about: Pick it by answering which process came up most often in leadership meetings this year. The fix is a working session with the people who run it daily, where you map how the work flows today and cut the steps nobody can defend. September then starts with the new version in place instead of another round of complaints.
If you're weighing a different project, ask: would it get done in a normal month anyway? Work that fits in October doesn't need August. Spend these weeks on the work that keeps getting interrupted the rest of the year.
Your vacation also shows you what to delegate
Before you leave for your break, write down who decides what while you're away, and share that list with the whole leadership team. Then switch off completely.
When you come back, read through everything that waited for you. Each item is one of two things.
- Either someone else could have made that call, and from now on it belongs on their desk. This issue we published covers how to hand it off properly
- Or it genuinely needed you, and it keeps its place on your own desk.
The Harvard study found CEOs spend around 11% of their time on routine duties their teams could own. A week or two away is the easiest way to see your own version of that number.
Go deeper
👉 Harvard Business Review: How CEOs Manage Time — read the full study behind the 43% figure, including how the most disciplined CEOs got that number up to 80%.
👉 Harvard Business Review: What Do CEOs Actually Do? — the data companion to the study; use it to compare your own week against 27 tracked calendars.
👉 Microsoft WorkLab: Breaking Down the Infinite Workday — see what the other eleven months look like: workers interrupted every two minutes, 275 times a day.
Coming up tomorrow
In tomorrow's issue, you'll get a step-by-step sequence for the first 120 minutes of a public crisis, built for companies without a comms team.
That's it for today!
P.S. We picked our August project too. We're deciding the direction of ExecEdge Pro. If you have two minutes, tell us what you'd want from it here.